in the texas freeze last year natural gas never stopped flowing even though power was out for about 5 days. I cut the wire to my gas furnace and put a plug on the end. My small 2kw generator could easily run the blower on my gas furnace.
We could still cook food on our gas stove.
We still had hot water from our gas hot water heater (though the pipes eventually froze).
I've only been to Austin + gotten gas around Amarillo on my way to ABQ, but as someone who's spent most my life in blue dots in red states, it's hard to put into words how angry that entire fiasco made me.
(And I'm someone who nearly did an MFA in Creative Nonfiction... I am very good at describing how I feel, it's a very purposeful exploitation of American libel law -- propaganda is the selective telling of truths, especially paired with our libel laws[1])
Anyways to swing it back to the article/thread:
Were you not able to run a thin stream of water?
I was lucky to have water included in every place I rented up til now, I used to joke if a landlord angers me I can set up a flywheel, but it also meant if it gets cold I'm not worried about cost if I switch it to the warm side and run a thin stream while I sleep or go out for espresso.
During the freeze, my family of four lived in the living room huddled around the gas fireplace. Stayed relatively warm and only needed a C cell to keep the gas flowing.
It had never been below freezing that long since we started recording temperature for large parts of Texas. Thus, home designs often don't bother dealing with the question "but what if its freezing cold for days on end?", so there's no consideration to putting a water line on an exterior wall. We even have tankless water heaters mounted in or on the exterior wall with plumbing only protected by a metal plate if even that.
In places where it does regularly get below freezing for long stretches of time they do try and avoid putting water lines on exterior walls specifically for this reason.
I'm in an apartment, so I think it's boilers + then in individual units you can supplement with a heater? It was actually a persistent issue early on the grad students would screw with the knobs, and it's harder to pop a window open in a place like Pittsburgh than the Bay Area.
The power needed to run a small fan is a far cry from what is needed to power a stove and the rest of a household. Battery, generator or even manual power would be sufficient.
>The power needed to run a small fan is a far cry from what is needed to power a stove
Orders of magnitude, I used to have an all electric apartment, using a fan versus AC was a 25 dollar difference or more. I used to do the math, and nursing an iced tea down the road during the hottest four hours of the day, some days, could pay for itself, but that was before the rents skyrocketed as scores of cost indifferent international students moved in just as I was moving out.
(Last I was in the town I'm referencing, it had gone from 500ish walkable to campus to more like 1K and littered with those damn scooters.)